Tools

Fun! That’s what most games are meant for. Some people argue it’s the meaning of life. Like in the book Homo Ludens (‘Playing Man’) by Johan Huizing. At least, that’s my over-generalized conclusion of a book that I have yet to read.. It discusses the “importance of the play element of culture and society”. Hence, the importance of playing Caromble!.

Our goal with Caromble! is to create a fun game. One of the aspects of creating a fun game is that it feels immersive. This requires a fine balance between boredom and frustration; or as we like to call it: the ‘Fun Flow’. The zone where you forget about time and yourself while having fun. One of the major slowdowns when creating Caromble! is to debug something and get side-tracked by playing the game. Yes, we as developers think to know the game is fun! Unfortunately, we aren’t important.

We are humble game developers serving the people’s need to have fun. You, the people, are easily bored and/or frustrated. I don’t mean to offend, but that’s the conclusion of manygamedesign books. So, we want to avoid boredom and frustration by doing our very best in balancing the game. One way to balance a game is to collect game metrics, identify unbalanced areas of a game, and… fix them!

How do we identify these unbalanced areas? By asking the right question. However, we are still arguing about what data to collect. But it will certainly contain data like:

How much time does it take to finish a level?

How many balls are lost?

How many times is screen X shown.

How do we collect these metrics? Unfortunately, it seems that the Steam SDK is not designed for this. So, we searched for another, easy way of tracking data and found Craig Timpany’s article from 2009 on how to collect game statics using Google Analytics. (As a sidenote he happens to have been involved with another brick-breaker – Shatter – as stated on his so-called ludography).

All Work All Play – Google Analytics dashboard with game metrics by Wolfgang Graebner

Another article by Wolfgang Graebner (2014) says this about using Google Analytics:

“It’s reliable, easy to set up, tracks common metrics such as views & hosts, supports custom metrics, and the data can be shared with others. That’s basically everything [you] need from an analytics service.”. It shows a nice example of collected data: